Okay, so this is entirely new to me. Sparrow is was an email client for Mac OS X and iOS (and Windows), which brought a decent Gmail experience to these platforms - as opposed to Apple's own not-so-good Gmail support and Google's Gmail iOS application which, well, is just a webpage. Google has now acquired Sparrow, and basically all hell has broken loose, to the point of Rian van der Merwe writing that 'we' lost "faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens".

Open source projects never die, they *can* fade away due to lack of interest (or incomplete, bad design, etc). *However* as long as a distribution network exists and users can find a 15-year old zip file with the sources to the application they need, projects can live on.

Experience: I've unearthed quite a few dead GPLv2 open source projects, modernized them, and placed them on life support at places like github.

Open source projects never die, they *can* fade away due to lack of interest (or incomplete, bad design, etc). *However* as long as a distribution network exists and users can find a 15-year old zip file with the sources to the application they need, projects can live on.

Except we use quite a few old open source projects for Windows where the source cannot be found, the authors cannot be contacted or have moved on and we are SOL, it taking a lot of money to move our intranets.

Open source projects never die, they *can* fade away due to lack of interest (or incomplete, bad design, etc). *However* as long as a distribution network exists and users can find a 15-year old zip file with the sources to the application they need, projects can live on.

Experience: I've unearthed quite a few dead GPLv2 open source projects, modernized them, and placed them on life support at places like github.

And you can put Egyptian mummies (or Lenin) on display ...doesn't make them particularly non-dead (though, in a way, much less dead than some scattered bone fragments, sure)